Quiet but creepy voices were calling out to me. I gasped out loud and sat up on my bed. Then, I thought I saw what looked like diaphanous creatures skulking about my ceiling. The spine-chilling phantasmagoria, which had leathery wings like the flying foxes, shuffled with a single mind toward my Plaster of Paris cornice before melding together to prosper as a singular organism. Against my will, I was soaring toward it.
“Who are you?” I yelled. “I demand you identify yourself. In the name of the Lord, my God, the Lord Jesus . . .”
Before I could finish, I was set free. I fell back onto my bed.
Thump!
I opened my eyes. I tried to get up but, in that second, I found my motor skills oddly uncoordinated. What should be a simple daily routine taken for granted was more laborious than wrestling with an alligator in quicksand while hog tied.
With a hand that felt as heavy as lead, I groped the wall behind me and, then, flipped the light switch. I mounted a systematic search for any unwelcome guests that might be creeping about my room. Aided by the light in the ceiling lamp, I looked inside my closet and under my bed. I searched inside my bathroom and behind every roller blind. I could find nothing and no one. I was alone. I had always been alone.
“There’s no one here, all right?” I scolded myself, sitting down on the edge of my bed. “It must’ve been a dream, but there’s nothing to worry about now. You’re home and you’re safe. Everything’s going to be okay.”
I killed the light and snuggled back under my comforter. I quickly fell asleep.
My sleep had been embraced with the eagerness of spring’s arrival until it was disrupted by a shrill noise. Startled, I began to stir. I tried to lift up on my elbows.
“What now,” I muttered, feeling annoyed by all the cloak and dagger intrusion.
Chirrs – sharp and deafening – tortured my tympanum. I threw my hands over my ears as the noises rose to a crest. I rolled off my bed, taking a serious tumble onto my hardwood floor.
Arhh! I yelled at the sting in my left shoulder on which I had landed. Perfect; right where I’d had my jab four hours ago.
Espying the front door, I quickly fell along the floor toward it. Before I was halfway there, the noises stopped Рas abruptly as they had begun. Then, I felt nauseated. I stumbled back into the bathroom where the toilet barely caught the beginnings of my foul vomit. Away I went, letting my inhibitions drop. I felt uncharacteristically blas̩ about making a mess of my clothes and bathroom floor. I was usually such a martinet about cleanliness. Instead, I was scared again, and also confused. I was part human, sure; but I was also part angel: it would take a lot to make me ill.
I had spat out the remainder of my vomit when something coiled itself around my neck. I was pulled backward. However, I was unable to tell who or what was assailing me in this way. I could only tell that I was alone in my apartment.
I was mistaken.
Across the tiled floor my invisible assailant forcibly compelled me back toward my bedroom. I caught sight of the doorway and clung to it for my life. I dug my heels in while I fought fervidly against the forceful manhandling, but I was haplessly frail against this force that was determined to prevail over me. My fingers began to bleed on the door post.
Finally losing my grip, I was dragged along the floor once more.
My arms flailed wildly above and beside me, vainly attempting to repel the assault. How many were there that had my home and me besieged? I couldn’t tell this either. And how to fight against what was unseen?
The coil around my neck tightened, nearly choking me out of my senses. I coughed and retched once more.
Out of desperation, I humbled myself and cried out: “Michael.”
My cry was barely audible.
For a few more minutes, I engaged in a struggle of wills against my captors. I strained to change into my angelic alter ego. Although my energy and strength needed a few more hours to revitalize, my wings were gradually coming into view. My captors were swift to react to this: something was lifting up my shirt to my chin. Then, something else was burning a mark into the skin of my chest. I was stunned.
A bit of smoke started to rise from the burn. As it did, I felt an intense pain travail the entirety of my being. I screamed from the pain and fought back tears.
I fainted.
I didn’t know how long I had been unconscious but when I came round, it was to the bidding of an odour wafting into my nostrils. It took me some time to identify the odour: it was sulphur. It sickened me so much that I retched. I rolled onto my stomach. It soon occurred to my mind where I had been taken.
“A lair,” I gasped, barely conscious of my small, raspy voice. “This is a demon’s lair.”
Voices whispering my name were filtering into my ears: Mishael. Mishael. Hey, Mishael.
I wiped my mouth before lifting up my face to answer the voices. Hooded figures were floating before me; they looked determinedly evil against the backdrop of the onyx hills.
“Abominable.”
I saw him next: the stranger from the rooftop.
“You.”
“Now, Mishael, that wasn’t terribly polite,” the winged stranger replied. “It’s completely unacceptable to criticize your host’s domicile and guests. Perhaps you need a lesson in manners to modify your behaviour. Though I must add that I’m not called upon to give freelance lessons in good etiquette and, so, I expect you to return the favour when the time comes.”
“No lessons needed,” I replied. I rose to my feet while I summoned my alter ego to take over me. My peripheral vision immediately caught sight of the primary feathers of my enormous wings. My trusty sword had also miraculously appeared on my person.
I added: “And you’re not my host: you kidnapped me. In my book, you’re a criminal.”
The criminal grinned while he raised his hands. The ground disappeared at once from under me. This time around, I was prepared for his trickery: I centred my core and did a flip in midair, aborting his attempts at upending me.
“O-ho,” my kidnapper laughed, feigning delight. “My little upstart, your aerial manoeuvres are quite sophisticated, quite impressive for one so young. I may have underestimated you.”
“A-ha,” I jested while I floated about in the air, “why, thank you very much . . . I think. But I detect a disingenuous tone in your compliment, so save your patronizing for someone who really cares. And another thing: you ought to avoid orchestrating this kind of overtures. It’s getting embarrassing.”
Still wearing his peculiar grin, my abductor made his move toward me. I edged back, putting up my guard, my hand poised on the hilt of my sword. But what transpired next so had me taken aback that I felt vertiginous in the air. I almost lost my balance. Where the angelic figure had been, only moments ago, was now supplanted by a creature of menacing proportions, all of eighteen feet tall, whose countenance and skin were so heinous that I had to muster my prowess not to appear repulsed.
“What are you?” I shrieked in horror.
“I think you meant to ask who I am,” the creature snickered. He proceeded to oblige me: “Abaddon, at your service.”
One more time, I felt the creature’s power overwhelm me. I was knocked off balance. The creature profited from this leverage over me, hurling me backward toward the hills. My attempts at surmounting the thrust of energy that was pushing against me were futile and, after being flung about ten metres away, I crash landed against a boulder. I hollered at the unbearable sting in my back.
My legs gave out at the same time.
That accorded me a short respite to massage my back. While I did, I seized the opportunity to study the creature more closely.
Blake, I quickly thought.
“Hah,” I smiled nervously, “that’s what you first reminded me of – a Blakesque figure of debased bearing. Blue gray wizened skin covered in elliptical plates, red bug eyes, an exaggerated forehead and sellion, abrasive sinewy limbs. If you had wanted to scare me with this transformation, you succeeded, for a while. I’ll give you that. Now that I’m getting used to your appearance, you look more like a comical character from a manga.”
The creature’s scowl let slip a philistine understanding of my aesthetic points of reference. Dismissing them with a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders, he undertook a giant leap toward me. He stood back from me, lifted me up and raised me to my feet. Then, he pinned me back against the basalt before launching into another litany of his tirade about good manners.
“No hellos? No how do you dos?” he hissed.
“Hi?” I replied with some mischief.
He deemed that as insolence – he wasn’t wrong to – and I found my throat in his grasp. This, he did, without even touching me.
“Individuals who practised black magic used to be burned at the stake, did you know?” I quipped in my ofttimes madcap fashion, choking on my words.
“Only witches,” he replied, smiling. “Only witches were burned at the stake, not angels. And that was mostly by our design. The witch hunters were a mob of ignoramuses.”
“Too right that you and your ilk were responsible for some of the worst crimes against humanity ever chronicled from the Dark Ages,” I retorted. “That was the age of grace. The Lord’s grace should’ve been extended to witches, too. They deserved the right to be given the chance to repent, too. On account of what you and your followers did, lynching and burning the witches, all in the name of the church, the church had had to carry the stigma of your deception and the world’s odium for generations.
“Nevertheless, the medieval church could hardly be identified with the true Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. It took a Christian man, Increase Mather, to put an end to the infamous Salem Witch Trials, when he proved that what the medieval church was doing to the sixteen witches was unscriptural and wrong. It’s time the whole world also learned how the true Church has been wronged through your deception. Haven’t you heard: Messiah’s return is around the corner? Then, Messiah’s true Church will be absolved, for God shall reveal the truth to the world.”
“Oh, for the love of Loyola,” the creature scoffed with a shrug. “What’s your beef, boy? What’s with the chauvinistic inclination to defend them? They were witches, after all. They deserved their punishment.”
“And you? What do you deserve, demon?” I asked him.
“I’m an angel like you,” he maintained. “I’m not a demon.”
“Right,” I spat. “Keep insisting on that. You might believe your own delusional attempts at gainsaying someday. But there’s a world of difference between an angel and a demon, which is what you really are.”
The creature threw his head back and laughed.
“Has anyone ever told you that you talk too much?” he asked sarcastically. “This should make you stop.”
He approached me. Standing before me, he pressed his lips against mine; I felt surprised but also revolted. While I gasped for breath, I felt something effused from his lips and enter me. My body froze in that moment.
Well, that was rude, I thought afterward, wiping my mouth of his kiss. What was that all about?
I was about to ask the creature but he had retreated about two feet from me.
“Sorry,” I ribbed playfully into him, “but I’m not that into you.”
He grinned. “Still yapping, I see,” he sniped back at me. “You’re like a little lap dog, aren’t you? Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap.”
Then, as though to suggest he was into the education kick, he maintained: “And that was not black magic; just a small sampling of my power. Your lesson begins now.”
The monstrous creature stretched out his arm. Once more, without touching me, he drew a sharp lance on my face, beginning on my forehead and ending on the bridge of my nose. I shrieked from the pain of the incision.
I also heard his contemptuous laughter.
“What is it about bad guys that are just so fond of breaking out in laughter while in combat?” I asked, raising my hand to my face. I felt on my fingers the warmth of my blood; this was trickling down inviolably from my nose to my philtrum and onto my lips.
I continued: “I used to think it was only in the movies but, here it is. Mwahahahaha – really? It’s always the same kind of affected and put-on laughter, too. What exactly do you guys find so amusing? The sight of blood?”
“Among others,” he answered, laughing again. He drew my attention to his raised arms.
What sharp talons you have, I thought nervously, my head swimming in his creepy laughter.
Before I knew it, I was choking. I realized, then, that the time for being facetious was over. I knew I was about to be embroiled in agonizing throes wrought by an entity whose power must surpass that of any other being – angel or demon or human – that I had ever encountered up to this moment. I reached my hands to my neck to free myself from the monstrous fiend’s disembodied hold on it. I was unsuccessful.
A gesture with his finger, and two deep gashes formed on my wrists, stinging me. I yelled and let my arms drop to my sides. More gestures followed as the monster, Abaddon’s talons smote the air with crisscrossing patterns, and I felt lacerations simultaneously stinging my cheeks, then my arms and, afterward, my thighs and calves. I was being lanced over and over again until I could no longer stand up straight. I was a bloodied mess for my clothes, my white shirt and trousers, were ripped and slowly being soaked with my blood. Tears were flowing unchecked now, mingling with my blood.
“Michael,” I whispered unashamedly.
What else could I do?
You have to come, Michael, I pleaded telepathically. Now. I think I’m going to need your help.
About this time, I felt Abaddon’s power begin to ebb. Before I could capitalize on this, I felt a debilitating blow land on my left cheek, and again. Following this, similarly dizzying blows landed on my other cheek and temples, over and over again, until I felt enervated. I was ready to pass out.
I defied the urge to surrender. Instead I tried to push myself up with my pelvic muscles. I very nearly got to my feet but for the blow to my solar plexus, which doubled me over. My knees buckled but before I would lose consciousness, Abaddon had grasped me by my hair, pulling back my head. With his other sinewy fingers gripping my throat anew, my adversary lifted me up easily from the ground.
“Are you ready to demonstrate manners befitting your pedigree?” my adversary taunted.
I humored him, muttering a half-hearted apology to him. He wasn’t convinced, but released me just the same.
My muscles atrophied and I collapsed, feeling dazed. Pulling myself together despite my numbness and fear, I started to back away. I pushed myself up and away with my heels and palms. My ocular mechanism had begun to fail me, shutting down. My head felt concussed, my heart pounded awfully against my chest and my palms bled.
“Why are you doing this?” I spluttered, tasting my blood bubbling on the surface of my tongue. Then, I felt hands, coarser than sandpaper, forcibly digging under my armpits. “What do you want with me?”
“I want you on my side,” he replied. “To be precise, I want you to fight alongside of me against your Lord’s angels – against the Archangel Michael and his army.”
“Fight against the Lord?” I scoffed, wiggling against the demons whose hands were clasped round my armpits. “Fight against Michael. I was right – you’re a minion of Satan, then, and an enemy of the Lord. In that case, you should know that what you’re doing is unlawful. You’re in repudiation of the Lord’s precepts to accost me without His permission. Tell your demons to let go of me this instant; I’m ordering you, Abaddon, for your continued rebellion against the Lord will bring about His retribution, on both you and your minions.”
My tirade was eschewed but I had quite expected it. After that, my captors lifted me up to my feet, which felt like jelly under me. They dragged me like a rag doll toward the demon, Abaddon, to whom they were gleefully paying their allegiance.
Against the odds – indeed, sometimes I wondered about the source of my strength when I was most in want, and I could only evince it was the Lord since He constantly watched over all His ministers – I mustered what smidgen of power was left in me, spinning fireballs that eyes could not see, and quickly tossing them at my adversary. The torrent of five fireballs, hurled in a seamless sequence, pummelled the demon concurrently in the face and head.
I was set free. My sense of indignation stimulating me to renewed vigour, I directed my ire at my captors, unsheathing my fiery sword and beheading two of them with it. I swung my sword with all my might, and proximity and opportunity enabled me to slice through the bodies of a few other demonic beings in its path. As I hurled myself toward Abaddon, I slew five more demons along the way, vanquishing them.
At last, I found myself face to face with Abaddon.
I heaved up my blazing sword and swung it in the direction of his neck. The demon, Abaddon, swiftly lurched to his left. He commanded the hills to break up. Boulders were flung up into the air before being hurtled toward me. I ducked, the boulders missing me by the breadth of my hair. I dodged a few times successfully but, before too long, I ran out of grace, not to mention fortitude, and something heavy pounded against the back of my shoulders. It felled me, landing me on my stomach. No time to re-gather myself, for I was yanked up. Once more, I was held up by my armpits while a wilderness varmint put my sword out of my reach.
“It’s over,” Abaddon, approaching, hissed at me. He forced me to my knees. Meekly, I lifted up my face to him. The demon took it, holding my chin with his hand.
“You can’t defeat me,” he maintained, his head distending. “You’re no match.”
I shook my head. I stuttered: “Your proclamation of victory is premature, demon.”
“And your refusal to admit defeat is foolhardy,” he scorned. “Look around you. You’re on your own. You’re outnumbered. And you have no weapon. Make it easy for yourself and surrender to me.”
“You won’t get away with this,” I whispered, trying to shake my chin free.
“And you’re in no position to make threats,” he replied. “As I’ve already told you, rather nicely, I might add, I want you to join my army. Choose otherwise and I give you my word: you will face a lifetime of torment by my demons. Today was just the primer. You fought with valour, I will concede, but I had been easy on you. Refuse to join me, and you will feel the full brunt of my might every time.”
I shook my head again. “No,” I whispered. “I will never join you.”
“Then be afraid,” the demonic being sneered, stepping back from me. At the same time he gave a terse nod to his minions. I saw them hoist up their scythes. I felt some of the other demonic angels hold up my wings.
Realizing what they meant to do, I shook my head.
“Don’t do it, Abaddon,” I pleaded. “Not for my sake, but for yours, and for the sake of your followers. The elders – Michael, especially – they’re not going to look kindly on this. You can take my life, but the consequences for you will be even more profound. And you have no right to break the Lord’s commandments. For even you must obey the Lord’s edict. Even demons must serve the Most High God. This is treason. You’re committing treason against the Lord.”
I felt like a fool to betray my vulnerability to the demon. Obeying Abaddon’s order to ignore my pleas, my captors brought their scythes down on my wings, hacking away at them at the same time.
Completely oblivious to my screams.
Even I was horrified by my own gut-rending screams. I could hear them ricochet in echoes over the desolate hills.
Above the echoes, I heard my breaths coming out of my lungs in sobbing pants. I studied my dismembered plumes trickle about me: they resembled crimson flakes of snow. I watched the ground below me: it was scorched and cracked. My eyes had started watering, blurring my vision, long before my feathers had settled on the ground in random and amorphous heaps all around me.
“Stop; please, please, stop,” I shrieked repeatedly at the immensity of the pain in my back. Then, I somehow managed to find the breath to whisper between my screams: “Oh, Lord, my God; Lord Jesus, make them stop. Help me, Lord Jesus, please.”
The whole world spun.
“Be very afraid, Mishael,” I heard my adversary caterwaul over my screams, “and remember my name. I am Abaddon, the Destroyer. I am Apollo, the Angel of Death.”
“Angel of Death,” I whispered with shock at the revelation. My head shook: “Apollyon? Not Apollyon.”
I looked closely at my adversary, at his face that was black against the clouds. I shuddered fearfully at the unmasking of this entity I had just met in battle. As I looked, the sky became filled with a tableau vivant of disfigured faces, ever swelling, ever slobbering, and ever screeching.
“Michael,” I whispered, desperately. I had frozen on my blood, cowed by my emotional anaemia. “You have to come. You have to take me away from this place. Dad.”
I finally crumpled in the pool of my blood.
My senses had been rankling at the scent of my own blood when I found myself plummeting. I fell and fell and fell. However, I felt neither fear nor pain. Instead, I felt wrapped in someone’s protective arms. I shut my eyes, embracing the possibility that I was falling to my death. Truth be told, I was welcoming death’s embrace.
Before long, I felt a springy surface break my fall. My mind cleared even as my eyes opened. I had woken with a start.
Yeaarrhh, I screamed, stunned by the pain in my body. So much pain. I was panting between screams. I tried to sit up but there were hands pressing me down. I realized they were human hands. Then, I realized I was in a hospital ward.
A small orb penetrated my eyes filtering into my pupils a slim pathway of light. Once, twice, three times. I blinked and blinked and blinked harder still. And I was bawling absurdly like a baby.
“Shh, shh,” a voice whispered. “I know you’re in a lot of pain, honey, but you need to cooperate with us. You need to try to keep very still, all right? We’re here to help you.”
Then, I was staring at the huge syringe above my arm.
“No,” I pleaded, “no, no, no. What are you giving me? Please don’t.”
Once again, I felt hands pressing down on me. I was battling with the humans but I was losing to them. How could that be?
“Michael,” I cried while I fought, “where are you? Don’t let them give me the Mark. Dad!”
“It’s not the Mark, sweetheart,” the same voice promised, assuring me. “Shh. It’s morphine. It’s just morphine. You need it for your pain. It’s all right. You’re going to be all right. Shh.”
As soon as my muscles had relaxed to the voice’s soothing, I felt a sensational twinge in my arm.
No, I thought again, fruitlessly, while the pain all over my body began to subside. Also subsiding was my consciousness of reality.
Someone was yelling at me, trying to wake me up. She was hurting my head.
“What’s your name, honey?” she was asking. “Can you tell us your name?”
“Misha,” I whispered with difficulty.
“How old are you, Misha?” she continued.
“Three . . .”
“Three? Do you mean twenty-three?”
I shook my head: “Four . . .”
“Twenty-four? Is that how old you are: twenty-four?”
I stared at the woman, feeling tongue-tied. I was actually three years old, but I couldn’t tell her that. They could send me to the funny farm for that. However, I didn’t want to lie either.
“Just write on the form twenty-three or twenty-four,” the voice was now advising the woman. “That looks about right, though he seems a little younger than that.”
“All right, Misha,” the woman continued. “Now, can you tell me how many fingers I’m holding up?”
I squinted. Then, replied: “Three . . . no, two.”
The woman left and another woman appeared over me. I thought she looked like a nurse. She started to probe the top of my head. There were hands probing about my nether regions. While I was being prodded, poked at, jabbed, I started to piece together, from the gossip around me, the short event that had taken place just before I was committed to the Intensive Care Unit.
Some co-ed had apparently found me in a bloody heap just below the steps of the hospital. He alerted someone else who had been on her way out of the ER. As it turned out, she was a surgeon, who put me on a gurney after determining that I was in need of emergency care. Dr. Rasha Mara had risked her career and life, the gossip maintained, since she had insisted I be committed despite not carrying the Antichrist’s loyalty marker in my person. This was a microchip embedded in the body, either the right hand or the forehead. The microchip acted as one’s health insurance, among other functions.
“Dr. Mara’s got courage,” the nurse maintained. “As far as she’s concerned, upholding the Hippocratic Oath takes precedence over upholding any vow made to a deity-wannabe.”
The irony, I thought. Does the good doctor spurn one deity-wannabe but revere the hordes of others in the Oath, those by whom she is sworn?
But this was all anyone knew.
“How did I get here?” I asked the nurse after she had ended the gossip.
She hadn’t heard me. Or else she didn’t care to answer, only to prod and poke.
A tube was shoved into my nose.
Did Abaddon set me free? I heard my own question as if spoken underwater.
The tube was roughly navigated down my throat.
Why can’t I remember? Did I escape?
My blood-soaked clothes were cut away from my body.
Or did Michael save me? Had he heard me after all?
I felt the cold hospital instruments invading my ears.
But where is Michael? And why has he brought me here instead of our Headquarters in Petra?
Everyone was talking at once again. Someone observed that my vitals were on a decline and rapidly deteriorating.
Someone else opined that I was dying.
Well, that was a given. I was dying, to put it succinctly. From the time my wings were severed from my back, my assailants had wound up the countdown clock that was to speed me toward certain death. This was why it was odd that I hadn’t been brought to the Headquarters Medical Centre. Only there had they the means and know-how to save beings like me.
Save. I repeated the word a few times. I recalled what the demon, Abaddon, had sworn to me. What was it? A lifetime of torment at his hands? If that was what I had to look forward to, perhaps I was better off dead. I determined on the spot that I didn’t want to be saved. Right after that, I felt overcome with shame for having demeaned the sanctity of life.
I shut my eyes. I wanted to shut out my pain and my shame. And the fact that none of the brethren appeared to care enough to come for me. This was a hard pill to swallow because the elders had always been so attentive to my needs.
My thoughts were, then, fixated on the elders.
“What’s all this?” I asked. Gabriel was unbagging the sundry of foodstuffs to store them into my davenport.
“Some snacks you can eat between meals,” my elder replied. “After pontificating yesterday’s catastrophe, the Council arrived at this temporary solution. In the meantime, the elders want you to stop feeding on the plants and wild mushrooms outside your billet. They remain appalled to learn that you’d been doing this for a few days. We don’t want a repeat of the food poisoning you had yesterday; have I made myself clear, Little One?”
I nodded. I picked up the food parcels and read aloud the labels on them: chocolate chip cookies, pretzels, vanilla-flavoured loakers, figs and dates, rice cakes, pistachio nuts, macadamia nuts, muesli bar (this one I had some trouble pronouncing), mixed nuts and sultanas, jelly beans, dried cranberries and sunflower seeds. Seeds?
“I know they all sound foreign to you right now,” Gabriel smiled, clued-in to my facial registers. “But I assure you; you will quickly acquire a taste for all these.”
I nodded: “Yes, but sunflower seeds? I may have wings but I’m not a bird.”
The elder smiled again. “No, you’re not a bird. You’re a fledgling – a little week-old fledgling. As a matter of fact, this is quite an apt handle to adopt for you: fledgling.”
My eyes rolled: “No, my name is Mishael.”
He chuckled, ruffling my hair: “So innocent. Pardon the pun, fledgling, but don’t go nuts, all right? You don’t want to consume everything all at once. This lot ought to satisfy your needs for at least a month. Michael shall be returning tomorrow night from his mission in Jerusalem to take you to the city. He will teach you all about grocery shopping then.”
I nodded: “I’ve never been to the city before. I’ve never been anywhere outside this garrison before. Will you be coming along as well, Gabriel?”
“No, fledgling,” he replied, “I have a number of assignments to complete this week. Perhaps another time.”
“What kind of assignments?” I asked, curious.
“Assignments for Eheyeh, of course,” he answered.
“Like what?” I asked further.
“Like what? Oh, assignments like Yah’s messages.”
“What messages?”
“What messages? Important ones like proclaiming His will to the nations.”
“What will?”
“What will? Well . . . what Yah wants the nations to do.”
“Like what?”
“Now, Mish,” Gabriel chided with a sigh, “you’re starting to sound like a human child: firing all these questions at me, one after another, in rapid succession.”
I scowled: “I am a human child. That’s what you tell me.”
“Well, that’s correct,” Gabriel nodded. “You’re absolutely right. But I can’t talk to you anymore, not tonight: I have to teach a class. Someday . . . not soon . . . but someday I shall tell you about my assignments for the Lord. You have my word, Little One. In the meantime, you can look forward to spending time in the city with Michael. You’re going to enjoy spending that time with him. You shall get to bond with your new Daddy.”
I smiled: “I shall like that very much.”
My elder smiled back at me: “As will Michael.”
Michael.
Mika.
Daddy . . .
“Can you hear me, Dad? Why haven’t you come for me?” I whispered while I wrapped up my brief flashback to the past.
My eyes roved toward a gray hospital gown. I was being dressed in it. I was also desperately missing home again.
